Themes & Page Templates

What is a Theme? A theme is a collection of files and folders used by the cms to control the visual look and layout of your website. At the very least a theme consists of at least one page template file and usually other associated web files such as image files, css files and javascript files. Every theme has it’s own directory in the cms themes directory. In most cases you will only ever need one custom theme for your website. If you were doing a major re-design to your website in the future you could update your existing theme or upload a new theme so you can easily change and fall back to the old theme if you need to. To add a new theme: 1. Create a new directory in the cms themes directory. 2. Upload your page templates and associated files into your new theme directory. 3. Go to Configuration in the cms admin menu and change the theme to your new theme. If you are creating a new theme you can also copy the existing default theme folder and rename it instead. This will ensure all required style sheets and images necessary for the cms to display properly are present in your new theme. If required images and style sheets do not exist in a custom theme folder, the ones in the default folder are used instead, therefore files in the default theme folder should not be modified or removed as they are used as defaults if a custom theme is missing a critical file. What is a Page Template? A page template is essentially a html web page file. It is used to determine page design, layout and positioning for dynamic content served by the cms. A page template can also be a php file. You should always have at least one page template file in your theme named default.htm or default.php When you add or modify a category or product in the cms you can select what page template to use. This determines the page design and layout for this particular page when it is served by the cms. With this approach each uploaded page template can be used many times over by the cms to display multiple web pages on your website. To display dynamic content from the cms a page template needs to have a special tag {page_content} present somewhere in the page. For more information on special tags see the page template tags help section.

Changing & Updating Page Templates

If you make changes to your page templates in just upload them again into your theme directory in the cms, but remember to login to the cms admin area first. The cms will automatically update any page templates you’ve uploaded but only when logged into the admin area. If you upload new page templates and you’re not logged in as admin when you do so, don’t worry, just login to the admin area as soon as you can and the cms will automatically import the new pages that were uploaded.

CMS Help - Advanced - Themes & Page Templates